Digital rendition of media, including audio and visual media, allows users to conveniently edit that media using common computing devices, such as a personal workstation or a notebook computer. One known problem is that such digital media are encoded in a wide variety of formats, each with differing advantages with respect to data compression, fidelity, precision, and possibly other aspects of the original digital media. This problem is particularly acute when a user is required to make a choice between data formats before an ideal trade-off among these factors is more completely known to that user. While it is possible to convert between pairs of differing formats, fidelity and precision often cannot be recovered once they have been lost due to data compression. On the other hand, sufficient data compression is often desirable to allow the digital media to fit into allocated storage, such as for a mobile device.